Posts Tagged With: food

On this lazy Saturday evening I really didn’t feel like cooking. And checking on the ingredients we had I immediately imagined a full of tastes herring sandwich. This fatty fish goes very well with pickles and onion. You really need to try it.

Ingredients:

Toasted bread

Butter

Marinated herring

Minced onion

Sliced pickles

Minced dill

How to prepare it?

Spread the butter on the toast. Then arrange all other ingredients on top and enjoy it 🙂

I hope you enjoy this lovely October day and celebrate its colors and gifts.

We did it with an autumn walk in the forest and were awarded with lovely views, warm colors and yummy forest parasol mushrooms. In October the forest gets changed every single day showing us its magic and warmth. If you find the time to see and listen to it, I promise you will not regret it. After a nice walk the stress level is down, the mood is up and you get inspired by the lovely nature around.

Then, going back home, we enjoyed our little harvest of parasol mushrooms by stewing them in butter, garlic and fresh thyme and with a glass of homemade red wine. This is what autumn coziness means to us – happiness in the simple little things 🙂

All you need when home alone and sick is comfort food. And today I enjoy and try to heal myself with Apple and Forest fruits Crumble and Cheesy Broccoli.

Ingredients for the Cheesy Broccoli:

Broccoli

1tbs butter

Olivr oil

2-4tbs flour

1 garlic clove

Fresh thyme

Gorgonzola

Feta cheese

Parmigiano

Salt

Pepper

How to prepare it?

Put the broccoli to boil. At the same time take an oven friendly pan and add in it few table spoons of olive oil and the butter. Then add the mashed garlic and the flour and start stirring to homogeneous mixture. Add the fresh thyme and few table spoons of the water where the broccoli is boiling (using this water instead of any type of cream, makes the dish much lighter, but the taste is not affected). Add the crumbled gorgonzola and the feta cheese and add a bit more water if needed. Season and turn off the heat. When the broccoli are ready, drain them and add them to the cheese mixture. Stir for few minutes. Then grate parmigiano on top and put in preheated oven. Bake till gold and it is ready 🙂

I hope you gonna enjoy this french/italian comfort dish as much as I did.

Today we keep cooking with leftovers. One of the best ways to use most of the ingredients left in you fridge, is to prepare a frittata out of them. What I had in my fridge was a leek stalk, a little frozen peas and after cooking a Broccoli cream soup , I had left broccoli leaves (which most of the people would throw away, but please – you don’t- use them). That’s why I decided to use all of them in a Leek, peas and broccoli leaves frittata 🙂

Ingredients:

Leek stalk

A handful frozen peas

Stewed broccoli leaves

6 eggs

A handful grated parmigiano

Salt

Pepper

Olive oil

Fresh thyme

How to prepare it:

Stew the leeks. Then add the broccoli leaves and the peas. Season and cook till all ingredients are soft and golden. Meanwhile beat the eggs together with the parmigiano and add them into the pan. Leave for few minutes and then put in a preheated oven. Cook till gold and ready.

I hope you gonna like it 🙂

The great thing about this dish, is that you can use any combination you have in mind (or in the fridge and i the kitchen cabinets). In future posts I will share with you more ideas for frittata.

To be in any of the Jamie’s Italian spots was pretty exciting for me. I had an unplanned business trip to Manchester and decided to take an advantage of it. And to be honest, I couldn’t wait to go and visit the place.

The entrance of the restaurant was very welcoming and was promising a great dinner. And it didn’t let us down. The building was meant to be a bank for a long time, but recently became one of Jamie’s Italian restaurants. The bank vault was kept and nowadays is a room which could be rented for special events.

The enormous space wasn’t exactly how I was imagining Jamie’s Italian though. I was thinking of a more cozy place than a bank.

But the food was a great example of Jamie Oliver’s passion for the Italian cuisine and of his whole philosophy for food.

The starters we took were Creamy Burrata cheese with cherry tomatoes and basil and Spicy Meatballs with tomato and basil sauce. Both of them a good example of the simple and non-pretentious Italian food.

The main dishes we took were Slow cooked lamb in Tuscan style and Swardfish steak with smashed avocado and cherry tomatoes salad. The taste was fantastic. The lamb was so lean that it was melting in the mouth and was seasoned great – as you really are in Tuscany and are able to try a mixture of all its tastes. The fish was light and fresh. The food was combined with craft beers and refreshing Pinot Grigio.

Then it was time for dessert – Lemon Cheesecake and Strawberry Semifreddo. So tasty, but so sweet. No matter how much a love sweets, I couldn’t finish my dessert. But the taste of it was the great end of a great dinner.

Going to the UK and to one of the Jamie’s Italian restaurants made me read more about the crisis of this chain earlier this year. The Italian restaurants of Jamie were almost let to bankruptcy and Jamie Oliver had to invest a lot of his savings to save it. And I couldn’t stop wondering why… Jamie Oliver for me is a synonym of affordable (both economically and in terms of time) way of cooking. He encourages people to go back to the homemade food and shows them how easy and cozy it is to eat home. May be here is the biggest mismatch of the ideas and the philosophy – eating home or going to one of Jamie’s restaurants? Jamie Oliver is already a very strong brand in the modern culinary industry but in my mind it is always meant for cooking at home and making people spend time and share food together and enjoy the coziness of their own homes.

I would go again there, don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed the experience and the food and I would like to try more of what’s Jamie’s choice to include in his menu. But I would definitely prefer to watch his TV shows, to read his books, to try his recipes at home.

If you have your own experience in any of Jamie Oliver restaurants, I would be happy to hear about it 🙂

In this lovely sunny autumn not-a-working Monday (at least in Bulgaria) I thought it is a great idea a Caramelized fruit cake.

Ingredients:

For the caramelized fruits:

Sugar

Apples

Plums

For the dough:

3 eggs

9 tbs sugar

9 tbs flour

1 ts baking powder

For the cream:

500g sour cream

2 tbs castor sugar

Vanilla extract

How to prepare it?

Put sugar into a big pan and leave it on medium heat till it gets caramelized.

Meanwhile cut the fruits into large pieces and arrange them in a baking pot. When the caramel is ready, pour it over the fruits and leave it a part. Then put in a large bowl the eggs and the sugar and beat till white foam. Add the flour and the baking powder and mix gently. Pour the egg mixture over the caramelized fruits and bake in preheated oven for approximately 40 minutes (or till gold). Meanwhile mix well the sour cream, the castor sugar and the vanilla extract. When the cake is ready, you have to turn it over till is hot (before the caramel gets harder). Then let the baked and turned over cake to cool down and pour the cream on top. You could decorate with fresh fruits (I used raspberries). Let the cake to rest for at least 4 hours and enjoy it 🙂 To add more autumn taste, you could use for the caramelized fruits pears or quinces as well.

I really hope you will enjoy this little piece of autumn in your kitchen 🙂

Last weekend was rich of events in my lovely Plovdiv. And the best one was the food festival Mood for Food – food for all senses. The festival took place for the first time ever – from the 14th till the 16th of September in the heart of Plovdiv. There were several restaurants and street food vans presented, as well as a lot of local and regional products. It was great how all the 3 days it was crowded the whole time. I see how the people of Plovdiv are getting more and more being keen on the food they eat and the time they spend with friends and family enjoying that food. It is a matter of life stile, so much part of the whole life of the city.

Coming back to the things I tried, I found out that there is an amazing locally made traditional dip called Gurmenitsa. It was simply fantastic with its several tastes – tomatoes, pepper and eggplants or just bell peppers and green eggplant. Then it was a great (both as taste and size 😄) portion of pork ribs – one of the best I have ever tried. All this combined with local drinks – craft beers and wine.

The great thing is that the festival was so successful that it will be repeated next year. And I can’t wait for it.

Going slowly to the Autumn, it feels more and more important to live that last days of the summer at their best. Either if this means a walk in the forest, a lunch outside, or one of the last summer barbecues.

We decided to spend one of the last summer weekends in the village, walking out with the dogs and at the end – having a barbecue with our friends 🙂

Spending quality time with our closest people is important and doing it with delicious and healthy food makes it even better. Our dinner was made of salad (with tomatoes from the garden), pork steaks, grilled vegetables and sea breams.

When you have somebody not eating meat (as me), an idea how to combine meat and fish on the grill is to put the fish in aluminum foil. The way we cooked our sea bream was that we seasoned it with salt, pepper, oregano, garlic, lemon and olive oil. The vegetables we seasoned also with salt, pepper, oregano and olive oil. The result was fantastic.

I hope you enjoy as much as you can the summertime. My husband and I are just back from our honeymoon and I can’t wait to share our food experience and inspirations during it. In each city we visited, we notices the biggest chalange was where and what to eat. That’s why I decided to share with you what we liked and enjoyed the most.

I will start with Lago di Como, Italy. What an amazing place… we had a lovely day at the lake – had a walk, took a boat trip and went up to Brunate with funicular. We expected the food there to be extremely costy, but in fact you could eat well and not to spend a small fortune. We had lunch in a nice restaurant near the Cathedral of Como. There was a daily menu (in most of the restaurants there are daily menus) with 3 dishes for a dicent price (in our case – each manu was 25 EUR, drinks excluded). Our menu was compsed of:

This amazing food we had with a glas of white wine from the region – Aldo Rainoldi – Zapel. The food was simply fantastic, the wine as well.

After a nice walk around the lake, we needed a rest and what is better in this case than another glas of wine with a view 🙂 We took the funicular to Brunate and found the most amazing views to the Lake – Il Balcone sul Lago cafe. The girls working there were very friendly, the views – stunning and it wasn’t costy at all. A glas of Pinot Grigio was served for only 3,50 EUR.

At the end, when you go back with the funicular to Como, you could enjoy Aperitivo (a drink with buffet included) for only 10 EUR (which is in fact even cheaper than in Milan). You could find Aperitivo in most of the cafes, even on the once around the lake.

I hope that these food tips will help you out if you are planning a trip to Como anytime soon. If you have your own experience on the lake, I will be happy to hear them 🙂

If you follow me for a while you will know how much I love food markets (you could read more here). Today I was in La Boqueria Mercat, Barcelona and I found out it was one of the places I liked the most in the city. The food markets are part of the daily life in Spain and are presented in each city. The food market in Barcelona has first started back in 1217 and the main purpose of it was selling meat. It has moved its position during the centuries, changed its name and finally in 1840 found its current place at La Rambla. Of you are in Barcelona, it is really a must visit.